A social network identifies individuals and the connections or relationships between them, typically from a relational perspective. Mathematical analyses may be used to develop or expand a social network to include links between people who are not otherwise formally connected as friends, family, or colleagues. For example, Internet messaging and social media services may use mathematically-generated operations to automatically recommend new connections to their users. Some existing systems attempt to connect users within a social network if the users have a high affinity for certain content, but only if the users are relationally close. In other words, existing systems are more likely to recommend a connection to a user if the user and the recommended connection are already closely related in the social network.